itch.io

I played this during December/January and it was such a nice experience. I put some time aside each morning to answer a prompt, exploring and worldbuilding the village.

The way answering prompts is slightly gamified with the dice role not just deciding success, but what stat guides your response, worked extremely well for me. With journalling games I often have trouble thinking of proper scenes, ones with a goal, a conflict, and a resolution. I get stuck just gazing at my surroundings without really engaging with the world. But the way the dice role required me to find something to either succeed or fail at worked very well at unsticking that mental block.

The prompts are varied and interesting and really got my creativity flowing. And the three stats that were to guide my answer/actions added an extra layer of variability.

I think I will play the game again next holiday season. Either in the same town, or maybe a different version of Hearthlight, we’ll see.

A lovely journalling game that I highly recommend to anyone who is intrigued by the theming on this page. The prompts 100% deliver on the vibes.

Absolutely adore this game. The prompts are well written and inspiring, providing just enough detail to really get your imagination going. They're not too vague or too specific.

The fact that you're describing a world through the eyes of a character just adds so much character to the descriptions. Near the end of my playthrough I stumbled upon a place that was just so obviously where my character came from, even though I started the game not knowing anything about them aside from their name.

The countdown too added a lot to the story. I found myself stretching it as much as possible, and then feeling so sad for the areas of the world I had to leave behind without documenting them.

It's just amazing how powerful a worldbuilding and storytelling tool this is. I've been working with this world for weeks now, using it as the setting for a novel. But aside from that it's also just a great game that I'll definitely play many more times. It definitely tugs at your emotions, to describe a world that will soon be destroyed or lost by whatever you decide the doom to be.